Welcome to Matt Zaske Online

A couple times a year I do some spot checking and a little manual cleanup in AD. This is triggerd by inventory/asset management analysis. I say "spot checking" because by and large the existing business processes and automations take care of the vast majority of changes, but for a couple of reasons there are always a few stragglers.

A project cropped up recently that required editing a number of disparate Group Policies in our environment due to a network share path change.

I was originally given a list of GPOs that were (somehow) identified as in scope for change; however, I knew immediately the list was incomplete and omitted some valid matches. So I was left with a choice:

The last two posts were inspired by conversations at MMS Flamingo and focus on using Slack as the communication/receiver for notices relayed from a Task Sequence step

Last week I wrote about a basic process I have in place to fire off a Slack notification when a Task Sequence completes.

A number of years ago I started having my primary OSD Task Sequences "check in" as one of their last steps. Specifically check in with key information so I can follow up as necessary ("trust but verify") with downstream actions to ensure our asset management systems are properly updated.

After spending much of the month of August on a European vacation, I'm back and preparing for my sessions at MMS Flamingo Edition coming up in October.

...or, How I Suffered Through an 'If it Can Go Wrong, it Will Go Wrong' Scenario for a One-Off Export of Database Tables

This is one of those posts I'm writing up because in the moment I was so incredibly frustrated about how unnecessarily complex this action was, and I still have the various browser tabs that ultimately provided me the necessary bits open.

Many years ago I wrote about the way I automatically generate the OSDComputerName value for most devices in my fleet.

If you work with a lot of disparate dev and test devices across different domains, tenants, etc., you might run into the sort of Windows activation issue I encounter.